Master and God Read Online Free PDF Page A

again at last, it seemed a sign that Rome would once more be great, its people fortunate under a worthy and energetic emperor. Now Vinius saw that the recently reinaugurated temple was burning so fiercely it could never be saved.
    Choking and completely spent, the vigiles had given up and were starting to retreat. Blackened faces told of their soul-destroying efforts. Vinius was signalled to stay back. Flames had reached the roof. The temple was too high, too isolated; there was no way for them to send up water to its cloud-scraping pediments, even if water had been available.
    Then someone shouted that priests were still inside. The cry of ‘persons reported’, dreaded by all firefighters, roused Vinius. Marginally fresher than the men who had been here before him, he ran up the great steps and through the massive portico columns. He heard protesting voices, but instinct propelled him on.
    Inside, the heat was so intense, air seemed to burn in his throat and lungs so that every breath scared him. The spectacle was lurid. The ceiling was hidden by thick smoke, but three enormous crowned cult statues of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva were lit by flickering red light. Vinius was no more religious than the next man in the armed forces; he honoured the rituals because you had to, prayed to be saved from danger, but had already learned that divinities had no compassion for humans. No calm-browed god had stepped in to protect him when the British homunculus launched the spear that nearly killed him. Even so, as the light from sheets of flame flickered across the towering statues, it was hard not to feel he stood in the presence of the gods.
    It was crazy to stay. Slabs of dissolving marble the size of serving trays were dropping from on high. Oil or incense must have spilled, so vaporous licks of blue flame were creating a molten floor carpet. Amidst the continuous roar of fire, Vinius heard louder cracks as massive columns and masonry began to break apart. The whole enormous building was groaning in what he knew must be its death throes.
    He glimpsed one body, prostrate before the statue of Minerva, in the skullcap with a pointed prong that marked a senior priest. Somehow he crossed the interior and found he had carried with him an esparto mat; he flung it over the priest then summoned the strength to haul man and mat backwards out of the sanctum. As he fled, the cult statues seemed to loom and sway as if they were about to fall. Smoke blinded him. Heat flayed him. His skin seemed to melt. Even the intolerable noise was distressing.
    Outside, the terrified Vinius hauled the priest free of the mat, got a shoulder under him and stumbled down the steps. Colleagues ran to relieve him of the burden, then they hustled Vinius from the temple forecourt, beating at his clothing which was now on fire. Behind him the roof must have failed almost immediately, with a tremendous crash, then sheets of flame poured skywards through it.
    The man he saved was stretchered away at a run. Vinius forgot about him immediately. Once his burning clothes were extinguished, he squatted on his haunches in the rags of his tunic, with a raw face, charred hair and eyebrows, burned arms and shins, and despair in his heart.
    They stayed up there, huddled in an open space where omens were taken, in case the Temple of Juno was threatened, but an alteration in the wind saved it. So although sometimes they had to beat out spot-fires, mostly they took a grim kind of rest, standing or sitting in silence as they watched the larger temple being consumed, counting the crashes as its huge columns keeled over. Each collapse seemed to mark their helplessness; each fall emphasised their failure.
    For Vinius that was the worst time. It ended in one last terrible night of exhaustion and despair. But it did end. A quieter dawn came, where cries and crashes continued, but the heat and smoke were noticeably more subdued, the fire at last starved and dying.
    Sporadic flames still